Radeon X700 Technology and Overclocking

The 110 million transistor ATI
Radeon X700 core (aka R410) is built on TSMC's 0.11 micron manufacturing
technology and is closely based on the high-end Radeon X800 core. To ensure that
the X700 does not compete with the more profitable X800 GPU, ATi has cut down
the core to just eight pixel rendering pipelines (as opposed to 12 for the X800
Pro, 16 on the X800 XT\PE). ATi also reduced the memory controller size from
256bit to 128bit. The otherwise hobbled Radeon X700 Pro still has the same six
vertex pipelines, which means at the same clock speeds the X700 can, in theory,
pump out as many triangles as its high-end brothers.

There are three members of the Radeon X700
family; the upmarket X700 XT runs with a core speed of 475 MHz and a memory
speed of 1.05 GHz, but only comes equipped with 128MB of memory. Then there is
the X700 Pro (as used on the PowerColor X700 PRO) which has a core speed of 420 MHz,
memory speed of 864 MHz and comes with 128 or 256MB of memory. Finally, the budget X700
has a core speed of 420 MHz, 700 MHz memory speed and comes with 128MB of
DDR.

Overclocking this bad boy!

We've had quite a
bit of luck overclocking ATi cards recently and were hoping this tradition would
continue with the PowerColor X700 PRO. Starting with the core at a stock 425
MHz, we passed the 450, 460 and 470 MHz marks quite easily. The core seemed to
max out at around 483 MHz. Anything higher and the card would lock up while
running benchmarks.

Since the X700 PRO
uses Samsung K4J553430F-G20 BGA DRAM, we hoped to be able to push the memory
quite far. Starting at the memory's default 864 MHz speed, we were ultimately
able to stretch it past the 1 GHz mark, which was quite good. In the end the
memory settled at a nice 1.04 GHz.

We had some
problems running the core and memory at their maximum overclocked speeds
together, and we had to lower both a bit to get the system stable. In the end we
settled for 474 MHz core and 1.02 GHz memory speeds to keep everything playing
nicely.